Independent Corner: Working with Hospitals to Better Serve Patients

Community Pharmacy Consultant Bruce Kneeland and Kevin DeMass, RPh, President of Apothecary Shoppe, Salt Lake City, UT, discuss how pharmacy works with hospitals to improve outcomes for patients.

Bruce Kneeland: Kevin, it sounds like you’re dealing with some unusual patients. That means you must have some rather specific relationships with the physicians and the medical community in the area. Tell me a little bit about that.

Kevin DeMass, RPh: We do. Our pharmacy is located right in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City, we’re kind of between the University of Utah and Temple Square and the airport. And we have been here for a long, long time, and it’s a highly dense area for people to live, go to work, and to go to school. So we have a lot of students, we have a lot of elderly, we have a lot of homeless that are here. So we work with our physicians here at the hospital and in our community, that when patients need extra care and extra services, we want to be that transitional pharmacy for them, so that we can get them back home, back to their families, back into the workplace, back to school, where they can live their best life.